June 30, 2016 Published ~ 3 years ago.

Facebook has announced a new change to its News Feed algorithm, favouring personal posts over news stories, in an attempt to maintain its personal element. What does this *really* mean for publishers though?

Facebook is all about connecting people with their friends and family and despite attempts to divert from its original concept, it’s not ready yet to leave it aside. That’s why it decided to downplay stories from publishers on users’ news feed, in order to promote more personal stories from their favourite people.

This announcement was not warmly welcomed by publishers, as it means that organic reach will probably drop even more (as if it wasn’t already low) and it will be even more challenging from now on to make it to a user’s news feed.

RIP organic reach?

Organic reach was already on decline over the past few years and even before the latest algorithm change, SocialFlow observed a drop of 42% from January to May, which was alarming for Page managers.

It’s apparent that organic reach was becoming more challenging and only engagement and relevance could improve it. However, if there was already a drop of 42% in posts’ reach from January to May, what could we expect from now on?

If Facebook is further promoting personal stories over news and brand posts, will we even able to talk about organic reach anymore?

Facebook confirmed in its announcement the possibility of seeing a reduced organic traffic:

“Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages. The specific impact on your Page’s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts. We encourage Pages to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends.”

Publishers are starting to worry about the recent change and this brings about the need to re-evaluate their content strategy, in an attempt to maintain a successful Facebook presence.

Aiming for value and relevance

In Facebook’s own words:

“The goal of News Feed is to show people the stories that are most relevant to them.”

It’s not just about promoting personal stories then, but it’s also about highlighting the content that is relevant for every user. This means that Pages may still maintain their organic reach, provided they understand their audience.

It is becoming more important than ever for a publisher (and any Facebook Page) to post informative and relevant content for its audience, in a way that it will maintain engagement and ensure posts are still visible on News Feeds.

More over, shareable content, what we also call ‘viral’, will still be important, as this is the organic way to ensure that a page’s reach is increased. Creative, unique and authentic content is always appreciated and this is the only way to maintain the organic reach in the post-algorithm era.

This may require a more extensive analysis of the Page and each post’s performance, although we assume that native videos will still be more important than other types of content. Facebook was quite clear on its preference of native content so this might be a good start for your experimentation over the forthcoming months.

Pay for traffic

It is inevitable that publishers will follow marketers in the ‘pay to play’ game on Facebook, in order to maintain their reach, but is every publisher able to do so? And what does this mean for smaller sites?

It won’t be an easy task for a small publication to maintain a Facebook presence without paying to promote (or boost) a post. This doesn’t mean that every small publisher should abandon Facebook, but it may become more challenging and there’ll be a need for more creative solutions.

Maybe it’s the right time for every publisher to understand that heavily depending on Facebook for traffic is not working anymore and it might be a good idea to consider further options, or simply to focus on other aspects of content marketing.

A change in news consumption?

A recent survey by Pew Research Center indicated that 62% of US adults are using social media to keep up with the news and Facebook is by far their first choice, with 67% of them using it for their news updates.

After the News Feed update, people won’t see the same amount of news stories on their feed and will ultimately affect the success of publishers’ posts.

Beware, this is not the end for publishers on Facebook, but it does call for more authentic, interesting, appealing, engaging content, rather than circulating the same old story across all publications.

Once again, big publishers will probably be less affected by this update, due to the authority, the budget and the engagement they already have.

People will not stop consuming content through Facebook, all publishers need to do is find is the right way to ‘get access’ to their users’ feeds.

(Hopefully the focus on engagement and virality will not lead to posts of lower quality, simply seeking to grab the audience’s attention)

Boosting the “echo chamber”

Another issue to consider is the filter bubble that Facebook has built over the year and how it only grows bigger with all the updates.

People are exposed to people, posts, stories that are relevant to their interests, their beliefs, their experiences and this ultimately affects their broader perception of the world.

Eli Pariser mentioned in his book ‘The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You’ back in 2011:

“Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.”

Meanwhile, Facebook published a post on its News Feed Values and mentions among others:

“Our aim is to deliver the types of stories we’ve gotten feedback that an individual person most wants to see. We do this not only because we believe it’s the right thing but also because it’s good for our business. When people see content they are interested in, they are more likely to spend time on News Feed and enjoy their experience.”

This sums up its concept, the news feed updates and how our news consumption is changing. As more and more people use the platform to keep up with the news, and as Facebook keeps pushing personal and relevant stories, publishers are also becoming part of a changing reality, which affects both the creation, but also the distribution of their future stories.

What’s the next step for publishers on Facebook?

There’s no need to panic (yet) regarding Facebook’s new update, but it may be a good idea to start examining your audience and the reactions your posts trigger, in order to be ready to deal with the new #Friendmageddon.

Every site will feel the need to analyse its current marketing practices, in order to spot the opportunities for further development to maintain the referral traffic that Facebook may offer.

Whether you already have an engaged audience or not, Facebook kindly reminded us once again that nothing is for granted. Time to adjust our social practices once again then.

June 29, 2016 Published ~ 3 years ago.

Apple’s latest version of its desktop OS has picked up a rebrand, bringing it into alignment with its tvOS, watchOS, and iOS lowercase stablemates. The rebrand also suggests that Apple is going to settle into a pattern of continually evolving its desktop OS iteratively — OS X is now macOS in perpetuity, with the internal codename now taking top billing. While it naturally picks up several new marquee features, the arrival of Siri on the Mac is by far the biggest news in macOS Sierra. Read on for our initial thoughts….

May 30, 2016 Published ~ 3 years ago.

The first was character mode. MS-DOS.
The second was the GUI, graphical user interface. Macintosh and Windows.
The third was touch. iPhone and Android.
The fourth is spatial computing.

At each introduction of a new user interface some companies either went away or became dramatically less important. When GUI’s came along Borland and Wordperfect, both companies bet on the older character mode and promptly went away.

Same when touch came along. Nokia and Blackberry bet against touch, or didn’t react nearly strongly, nor quickly, enough. They are either gone or really much less important than they once were.

I can not see a world where Apple goes away, not with $220 billion in cash reserves.

But I CAN see a world where Tim Cook goes away and his legacy is dramatically changed.

The Apple Watch didn’t hurt him. At least not beyond a small skin scratch. That will not be true when spatial computing comes along.

First, what is spatial computing? Run a Google Search on the term and you find: “Spatial Computing is a set of ideas and technologies that will transform our lives by understanding the physical world, knowing and communicating our relation to places in that world, and navigating through those places. The transformational potential of Spatial Computing is evident.”

It already is arriving, though. Self-driving cars use spatial computing. Robots use spatial computing. Drones, especially ones that map out the world at some level, are using spatial computing. Google will soon introduce spatial computing to smartphones, in the introduction of Tango sensors that map out the world. Robots use spatial computing, particularly those from Boston Dynamics, another Google company.

Finally, mixed reality glasses use spatial computing. Microsoft Hololens is showing you spatial computing and the four video cameras on that product that map out the real world are what bring you both spatial computing and mixed reality. Magic Leap is preparing to launch products in the next 18 months, and has $1.3 billion invested in it so far by a group of companies led by Google and Baidu. Only insiders are paying attention, but both products let you walk around the real world and see virtual items placed on them. Go to YouTube and search for Hololens and you’ll see lots of demos of what spatial computing looks like.

Now, it isn’t clear yet to most people what will force Apple’s hand here. That’s the crazy thing. I know of several mixed-reality-spatial-computing glasses under development:

I’m seeing amazing demos, I’ve been including a few in my speeches around the world, and meeting with engineers that are working on some of these projects (later this week I’ll be in Israel to meet with such).

Also Meta and others are developing new spatial user interfaces. If you haven’t seen my tour of Meta that I did back in February (you need to be logged into Facebook to view), you really should. There you’ll meet some of the people who developed Tango, but are building a new user interface.

Anyway, back to the point. I bet that Tim Cook is going to try to follow Steve Jobs’ playbook. Which is watch everyone else prove there’s a market but wait until you can provide a better alternative. After all, the iPod wasn’t the first audio player. The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone. The iPad wasn’t the first tablet.

We know Apple and Tim Cook knows what’s coming. Cook hired a professor from Virginia Tech who has seen Magic Leap. Or at least his students had seen it. Cook also has bought a number of companies in VR and AR, including Metaio, which showed me monsters on top of buildings years ago.

Here is the rub: Tim Cook isn’t Steve Jobs. He doesn’t have the market thinking he’s a genius. It will be a LOT more skeptical of Cook’s claims than it did toward Jobs. Cook rarely talks about products. He’s not someone I expect to sit down with for an evening and talk about great new products, like, say, a Tesla, and have a stream of visionary feedback about what does and doesn’t work.

Cook doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who can get a superhuman effort out of a development team, either, the way Jobs could. Which is important for focusing a team on a market window. Lets be honest, most of the world’s great products came with quite a bit of pain on behalf of employees. Will Cook’s nicer way of working work at Apple to bring us a world-defining product? The jury is out.

So there are a lot of questions, heck, questions that the Apple Watch didn’t answer, and, in fact, caused to get louder.

Is Cook a product guy? So far the answer is no, he’s not.

To date that hasn’t hurt his legacy. He’s still leading the best company on earth. The one with the best retail stores. The best innovation legacy. The best brand. The best supply chain. The best marketing and PR teams. The best profits. These are daunting advantages for Apple, but if Magic Leap ships and Apple can’t match it for years you’ll see many switch brand preference. Then Tim Cook really will be gone and his legacy will not be a sweet one, but rather a sour one as the guy who hobbled Apple.

All this is saying is a new user interface is coming. Will it bring with it major corporate change the way previous user interfaces have?

History says yes.

Tim Cook better worry.

On the other hand, if Tim Cook delivers in the coming spatial computing era, well, then, he will finally put Steve Jobs in a box that Apple can really move forward from.

Are you a betting person? If so, where would you put your money?

Honestly? I just am not hearing good things out of Cupertino lately and the folks at Google and Microsoft are bringing real innovations to the market.

April 15, 2016 Published ~ 3 years ago.

GOLDEN, CO—Their eyes widening in amazement as the 43-year-old rattled off the names of heavy hitter after heavy hitter, impressed members of the Dreeshen household confirmed Friday that the roster for their mom’s upcoming dinner party was absolutely stacked. “Wow, she’s got Joyce from work, Cheri, Dana from yoga, Carol, Carol’s new husband—that’s all of the A-listers, together under one roof,” said Dreeshen’s daughter Michelle, wondering aloud how her mother managed to nail down such a jam-packed murderers’ row of neighborhood all-stars. “Jesus, she even managed to pull Dr. Fuller and the Jacobsons. Top to bottom, it’s just loaded. There’s not a single weak spot in the entire guest list.” Sources reported that such an imposing, big-name lineup would “absolutely crush” the likely dinner party topics of the Wannemakers’ new deck and Carol’s upcoming trip to Italy with her son …

January 18, 2016 Published ~ 4 years ago.

Dearest Cute Overload Peeps, It’s hard to believe that Cute Overload has chronicled and celebrated over ten years of the most anerable, prosh, sweetest ani-pals and commentary. It’s been over ten years, with hundreds of thousands of comments, millions of page views, thousands of photos, countless awards, including five Webbys, and of course, hilarious captioning from Brinke, Mike, Pyrit, Prongs, […]

October 6, 2015 Published ~ 4 years ago.

Many important considerations impact software design. Business goals, user goals, user context, cultural considerations, platform paradigms, branding requirements, devices … the list goes on and on. While a primary focus for any software design effort should be the data or other content that’s being displayed, this keystone element is often given short shrift. This is unfortunate and shortsighted. Given the focus it your content will receive, it should be a primary consideration during the design process.

It is a common practice to represent data and content as “Lorem ipsum,” repeating data, or simply using “best case scenario” data. In reality, this isn’t what will be experienced in the final product. The data you have to work with can drastically affect the final design, and the design will influence the type, format, and presentation of data.

Infusing Real Content into Your Designs

February 3, 2015 Published ~ 5 years ago.

Joystiq will not grow to be much older than ten years. That’s a massive expenditure of time, if only to receive an unfinished creation in return. I, and my best friends in the world, leave Joystiq unfinished. We leave it as it was always going to be….

November 13, 2014 Published ~ 5 years ago.

We respect its storied history, and value the contributions of its many readers, but we can no longer support it at the level it deserves. Theres a wealth of great information here that many will find useful, so we’ve elected to maintain it in a read-only form. Thanks for your many years of attention and everything you’ve done to make the site such a valuable resource.

September 19, 2014 Published ~ 5 years ago.

Brightpoint Consulting recently released a small collection of interactive visualizations based on open, publicly available data from the US government. Characterized by a rather organic graphic design style and color palette, each visualization makes a socially and politically relevant dataset easily accessible.

The custom chore diagram titled Political Influence [brightpointinc.com] highlights the monetary contributions made by the top Political Action Committees (PAC) for the 2012 congressional election cycle, for the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The hierarchical browser 2013 Federal Budget [brightpointinc.com] reveals the major flows of spending in the US government, at the federal, state, and local level, such as the relationship of spending between education and defense.

The circular flow chart United States Trade Deficit [brightpointinc.com] shows the US Trade Deficit over the last 11 years by month. The United States sells goods to the countries at a the top, while vice versa, the countries at the bottom sell goods to the US. The dollar amount in the middle represents the cumulative deficit over this period of time.